Masterpieces rescued from a watery grave

By Alan Riding in DresdenAugust 17 2002

A road sign to Schiller Square, Dresden, 2m underwater. Photo: AFP

Below the paintings by Raphael, Rubens, Rembrandt and other old masters that crowd the walls of the Zwinger Palace, hundreds of other works by renaissance and baroque artists line the floor, survivors of what might have been a cultural tragedy when the palace's underground storage rooms flooded on Tuesday.

Working by the light of candles and torches, 200 museum employees, police officers and soldiers carried about 4000 paintings to the upper floors of the 19th-century palace as the River Elbe rose by the hour. Six paintings too large to move were attached by ropes to pipes in the ceiling in the hope that the floodwater would not reach them.

"It was like a horror movie," said Martin Roth, managing director of the State Art Collections of Dresden. "But under horrible circumstances, we were lucky. We found the right people to help and no-one panicked."

Since the reunification of Germany in 1991, the eastern city of Dresden has been working to rebuild itself around its historic cultural image. Even now, cranes stand above church towers as restoration goes ahead on the Schloss, one of the former royal residences of the Saxon dynasty that played a crucial role in turning this city into a baroque jewel.

Yesterday the worst floods in mpre than a century drove tens of thousands from their homes across eastern Germany as rising water threatened to submerge the centre of Dresden.");document.write("

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Residents of east German towns along the Elbe and its tributaries braced themselves for more flooding. By the early hours of yesterday the river had reached a height of 8.6 metres, just 17 centimetres short of the highest level on record, 8.77m in 1845.

As countries along the route of the floods struggled to come to terms with the multi-billion-euro cost of cleaning up, the German Government said it would foot the bill for billions of euros worth of repairs to its public infrastructure.

In the German town of Pirna, near the Czech border, emergency services and troops began evacuating 30,000 residents overnight on Thursday as floodwaters from the Elbe swamped the area.

In the Czech capital, Prague, officials were counting the costs as the water level eased on the River Vltava from its peak on Wednesday, although Prague's Old Town has been spared from flooding. A few dozen residents were allowed to return to their homes late on Thursday.

German emergency services said another 35,000 people in the cities of Bitterfeld and Magdeburg in the neighbouring state of Saxony-Anhalt were also on stand-by to abandon their homes. Authorities said chemical plants around Bitterfeld were not in danger of being flooded, allaying fears of chemical leaks similar to a release of chlorine into the air following flood damage to a chemical plant near Prague on Wednesday.